from Claire Robinson

+ NEW U.S. CALL FOR AFRICAN LEADERS TO BE TRIED FOR "CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY"
Tony Hall, the US ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, has repeated his call for African leaders who refuse the US's GM-contaminated food aid to be tried for "crimes against humanity". Hall's comments have played a part in a viral marketing strategy aimed at painting the US and biotech as the saviours of Africa and those that raise concerns as villains.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4889

+ HAWAII: GOVT FORCED TO REVEAL PHARMCROP TEST SITES
In a first step toward public disclosure of test sites of biopharmaceutical crops, the US Department of Agriculture was forced by court order to reveal the locations of these sites in Hawaii.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4884

+ ARKANSAS RICE GROWERS REJECT "PHARMA RICE"
The Arkansas Rice Growers Association has voted to approve legislative efforts to ban the production of pharmaceutical or industrial rice in Arkansas. The vote came in response to Ventria Bioscience's leaving California and relocating to Missouri, where they hope to plant their GM drug-producing rice this year.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4873

+ FOOD, HEALTH AND BRIBES
In Indonesia, Monsanto employees used bribery to try to buy the company out of the need for an environmental impact statement. If Monsanto finds it necessary to bribe at least 140 officials and family members for half a decade in a country that only makes less than 1% of its overall revenue, what can we expect in places where there's more at stake? All human safety data for Monsanto's GM crops - if any exists - is provided to regulators by Monsanto itself.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4874

+ AUSTRALIA: POULTRY GIANTS QUAIL AT GM FOOD PROTESTS
A consumer backlash against GM food has prompted the three largest poultry companies, which produce 80 per cent of chicken sold in Australia, to stop using GM feed. http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4891

+ GM FOOD FIGHT: DAVID SCHUBERT
An article on the lack of safety tests on GM foods, citing various scientists, is at
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4882

+ SOUTH AFRICAN GOVT MUST TELL ALL ON GMOS
Environmental group Biowatch has gained a major victory in South Africa, obtaining a Pretoria High Court order compelling the government to divulge details of all GMOs brought into or manufactured in the country. But, bizarrely, Biowatch was landed with Monsanto's costs by the court even though it was agreed that Biowatch was acting in the public interest!
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4918

+ PUBLIC RESEARCH FRAUD - GM WATCH SPECIAL REPORT
A bunch of scientists claiming to represent the public research sector are perpetrating a new fraud. They've launched an initiative - The Public Research Sector Initiative - executed by a foundation called "Public Research and Regulation". The initiative is based on deceit.

The biotech scientists involved are saying that they represent a third non-aligned group between civil society and industry who should "weigh in" at meetings of the Cartagena Protocol that help determine biosafety rules.

Their call for increased leverage for "nonprofit", "public sector" players belies the heavy industrial-alignment of most public sector agricultural biotechnology, where there is a long history of dependence on industry funding. The effect of this is to generate convergence between private sector and public sector.

This convergence means that this "third" group would not be non-aligned but would have interests and an agenda that would all too often be indistinguishable from that of the industry. In other words, GM proponents would get two bites of the cherry to the rest of society's one.

Although the biotech scientists claim it is a "misconception that modern biotechnology, and in particular its agricultural application, is the exclusive domain of a handful of big, western multinationals", they are holding their meeting (3-4 March) at the Donald Danforth Plant Sciences Center in St Louis, Missouri - home town of Monsanto. The Danforth Center was established by Monsanto Corporation "and academic partners" with a $70-million pledge from Monsanto. The company also donated land on which the Center is built.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4943

+ ROCKEFELLER PRESIDENT IS NEW MAN AT DFID
A campaign to push more public money into GMOs has received a boost with the appointment of a GM proponent to help oversee the international aid programmes of Britain's Department for International Development (DFID). The campaign has been underway for some time on both sides of the Atlantic.

DFID has now appointed Gordon Conway as its chief scientific adviser. Until recently, Conway was president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Recently, the Rockefeller-funded Center for Science in the Public Interest called for extra public investment in GMOs. In 1999, Conway, the author of "The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century", told a meeting organised by Monsanto that "the Rockefeller Foundation has funded over $100 million dollars of plant biotechnology research and trained over four hundred scientists from Asia, Africa and Latin America". Conway has made clear his own support for the technology.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4881

+ BANNED GMO TURNS UP IN FOOD AID
A banned GM variety of corn forbidden for humans in the US is being handed out in UN food aid to Central America and the Caribbean. A study found that samples of World Food Program shipments collected in Guatemala included StarLink along with other GM contaminants. The study looked at 77 samples of imported corn included in aid shipments or sold on the open market. Eighty percent was reported to include GM material. Starlink corn was pulled from the market in the US because of concerns it could provoke allergic reactions.
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4911

Alejandro Lopez, representative from the regional office of the WFP for Latin America said, "The issue of GM food is an old controversy in which the WFP is not going to enter."
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4916
http://www.lobbywatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=4932

+ ROBERT VINT OF GE FOOD ALERT COMMENTS:
"This situation has only arisen because the USA, unlike other nations, supplies food aid in the form of dumped surplus grain. Other members of the World Food Program - eg the EU and Japan -disapprove and instead supply cash to purchase food as near to the recipients as possible. Buying locally supports peasant farmers in developing nations as well as enabling choice; dumping free food puts local farmers out of business... It is reasonable to blame much of the rural unemployment and food dependency of developing nations on the impact of US food aid policies... Oxfam America has estimated that up to 80% of funds channelled through US Food Aid Program... are spent, not in developing countries, but in the US. US food aid shipments correlate with times of surplus and silo emptying - not with times of food shortages."

+ CORE MAKES PRO-GM VIDEO
African-American civil-rights-turned-corporate-rights group CORE has made a video, "Voices from Africa", said to show the results of its fact-finding trip to Africa. The video was premiered at CORE's "UN World Conference-2005" on "Biotechnology" (New York, January 17-18, 2005).

Its main presenter is CORE chairman Roy Innis, who says, "Because of my concern [about hunger in Africa], I came to Africa to see for myself... and to see the potential for biotechnology." Roy's philanthropic mission is totally unconnected, of course, with Monsanto becoming CORE's "Corporate Partner".

Veteran black American journalist

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